L'Odalisque (detail) by François Boucher
8"x10" ($40) | 11"x14" ($85) | 16"x20" ($275) | 20"x24" ($675) | 24"x30" ($1,100)
Not-just-any-Tuesday greetings, collectors! Jen here to enthusiastically introduce today’s very special edition, which we’re launching in support and celebration of my dear friend Glynnis MacNicol’s new memoir. I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is a luminous account of her adventures in Paris just as the world was beginning to emerge from the first wave of the pandemic. There’s a lot of excitement around this book, and its contents and its cover have generated a soupçon of controversy too. Our modern society just isn’t sure what to do with a mature, independent woman who wholeheartedly pursues joie and fulfillment on her own terms and apparently they (we?) just can’t handle the female form either, even if the form in question happens to be a 1745 painting that hangs in the freaking Louvre. Naturally, we decided to make a print based on the original Boucher work that’s featured on the book cover, and are delighted that Glynnis herself wrote an introduction about the painting for us. Read on for that, and if you’re at the office, take caution when clicking through to the full image.
— Jen
L'Odalisque (detail) by François Boucher
In August 2021, I was in Paris and decided to go to the Louvre. While I’d visited Paris many times over the years, I hadn’t been to the Louvre since 1994 when I was 19-years-old. There was always an enormous line snaking around the glass pyramid and I didn’t relish doing battle with all the tourists inside. There were plenty of other museums in Paris.
But that summer, thanks to a combination of travel restrictions and the arrival of the Delta variant, Paris was mostly empty. Each time I biked past the Louvre, the absence of that line was notable to me. What the hell, I thought one day. Now’s your chance. So, I bought a ticket.
L'Odalisque (detail) by François Boucher
Having the Louvre almost entirely to oneself is a privilege generally reserved for the very wealthy or the overnight staff. There was still a small crowd around the Mona Lisa that day, but otherwise entire corridors were empty. By the time I made it up to the second floor I hadn’t seen another person in fifteen minutes.
The Louvre is an intense museum full of intense artwork. Lots of blood and guts and angels and vengeance. Having no buffer between me and all these operatic masterpieces soon became overwhelming. The second floor felt calmer, though. Less Heaven and Hell and more portraiture. Not everyone appeared to be bleeding to death.
Then I turned a corner and saw myself.
Or at least, that’s how it felt.
What actually happened was, I turned a corner and came upon, for the first time, François Boucher’s L'Odalisque.
After a certain age, one stops seeing oneself represented in culture. To be a woman without a partner or children in your mid-forties (I was on the brink of turning 47 that summer) is to be largely rendered invisible. It’s often been notable to me that when I do find representations of myself – a woman having a solitary meal; walking alone; appearing to enjoy her own company – it’s frequently in paintings depicting sex workers (or in the case of Matisse’s Odalisques, models modeling sex workers). In other words, the only women who were allowed on the streets without a chaperone (though, they needed to apply for a license from the city).
L'Odalisque (detail) by François Boucher
Boucher’s painting is not of a sex worker. It’s believed to be of his wife Marie-Jeanne Buzeau, a respected painter in her own right. And it immediately felt deeply familiar to me.
After more than a year of lockdown isolation, I’d been in Paris for five weeks enjoying myself in every way available to me: friends, food, dancing, drinking, and plenty of sex.
My immediate thought when I saw Boucher’s masterpiece – with its rich blue velvet tapestry and gilt frame; the inviting glance of the subject, and that splendid bare bottom – was, this is a very accurate depiction of how I’ve been spending my time!
What a transformative relief to encounter a woman who both appears to have some agency (the sense is not of a person posing, but of a person waiting for, nay, inviting, more please) and is enjoying herself. What a gift so see some approximation of my own enjoyment gazing back at me.
I must have stood there for half an hour. I wanted to join her. I wanted her to join me. In the years since, I’ve braved the line-ups and throngs of tourists simply so I could make my way to the second floor and say hello again. And enjoy the pleasure being in her presence.
— Glynnis MacNicol
